No offense, Mary, or any other former history majors. Actually, I loved history classes in college and took them just for fun. Of course, I don't seem to have retained much. And you all know my shortcomings when it comes to geography. Recently, I had an opportunity to screw them both up simultaneously: I have been slogging through "The Historian" going, "The Carpathians? Who were they? Did they come before or after the Ottomans?" I finally looked it up on Wikipedia and, oh my. It seems The Carpathians are a mountain range. Whoops. I guess that's why I majored in english. Anyway, if nothing else, this book has prompted me to do a little brushing up on my European history. Not that I will remember any of it...
The thing that's been frustrating me about this book has been the short little bursts of intrigue interspersed between pages and pages of boring narrative where nothing happens. It was getting frustrating and I found myself skipping those parts and paging forward to the "good bits". But you know what? I went through the first, oh, 150 pages or so, wanting to give it up and then... it started getting better. I'm in over 230 pages and things are starting to happen. I have hope for the future and can see myself actually finishing this. My plan for today is to spend at least part of the day in the back yard in a lawn chair reading. Molly said something about her mother saying that this was a good book to read in the dark days of fall or winter and I agree. It seems sort of incongruous to be reading it on a warm, bright summer day but maybe it's a good thing for me. I have been reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and now, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" out loud to Travis and Val in the evenings and then reading "The Historian" the rest of the time. If it weren't for the bright weather, I would probably feel kind of dark and moody right now.
Anyway, stick with it--it looks promising.
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The book does has it's moments. I am at Rossi's letters right now and those have proved to be better pages than before.
I must have skipped over the fact that Georgescu was Scottish and just read the part that he was a gypsy. I kept picturing this middle eastern person but the dialog written for him was all wrong. I kept reading it in my head like a scottish accent too so I guess the author did that part right. I was relieved , finally, to read that he was, indeed, a Scot not a Turk or Hungarian. For S & G's try reading Georgescu's dialog with a middle eastern accent then you'll understand the dilemma I was in for several nights.
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